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 Statistical Learning


Deep Graph Anomaly Detection: A Survey and New Perspectives

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Graph anomaly detection (GAD), which aims to identify unusual graph instances (nodes, edges, subgraphs, or graphs), has attracted increasing attention in recent years due to its significance in a wide range of applications. Deep learning approaches, graph neural networks (GNNs) in particular, have been emerging as a promising paradigm for GAD, owing to its strong capability in capturing complex structure and/or node attributes in graph data. Considering the large number of methods proposed for GNN-based GAD, it is of paramount importance to summarize the methodologies and findings in the existing GAD studies, so that we can pinpoint effective model designs for tackling open GAD problems. To this end, in this work we aim to present a comprehensive review of deep learning approaches for GAD. Existing GAD surveys are focused on task-specific discussions, making it difficult to understand the technical insights of existing methods and their limitations in addressing some unique challenges in GAD. To fill this gap, we first discuss the problem complexities and their resulting challenges in GAD, and then provide a systematic review of current deep GAD methods from three novel perspectives of methodology, including GNN backbone design, proxy task design for GAD, and graph anomaly measures. To deepen the discussions, we further propose a taxonomy of 13 fine-grained method categories under these three perspectives to provide more in-depth insights into the model designs and their capabilities. To facilitate the experiments and validation, we also summarize a collection of widely-used GAD datasets and empirical comparison. We further discuss multiple open problems to inspire more future high-quality research. A continuously updated repository for datasets, links to the codes of algorithms, and empirical comparison is available at https://github.com/mala-lab/Awesome-Deep-Graph-Anomaly-Detection.


Extrapolative ML Models for Copolymers

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Machine learning models have been progressively used for predicting materials properties. These models can be built using pre-existing data and are useful for rapidly screening the physicochemical space of a material, which is astronomically large. However, ML models are inherently interpolative, and their efficacy for searching candidates outside a material's known range of property is unresolved. Moreover, the performance of an ML model is intricately connected to its learning strategy and the volume of training data. Here, we determine the relationship between the extrapolation ability of an ML model, the size and range of its training dataset, and its learning approach. We focus on a canonical problem of predicting the properties of a copolymer as a function of the sequence of its monomers. Tree search algorithms, which learn the similarity between polymer structures, are found to be inefficient for extrapolation. Conversely, the extrapolation capability of neural networks and XGBoost models, which attempt to learn the underlying functional correlation between the structure and property of polymers, show strong correlations with the volume and range of training data. These findings have important implications on ML-based new material development.


Towards Multi-view Graph Anomaly Detection with Similarity-Guided Contrastive Clustering

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Anomaly detection on graphs plays an important role in many real-world applications. Usually, these data are composed of multiple types (e.g., user information and transaction records for financial data), thus exhibiting view heterogeneity. Therefore, it can be challenging to leverage such multi-view information and learn the graph's contextual information to identify rare anomalies. To tackle this problem, many deep learning-based methods utilize contrastive learning loss as a regularization term to learn good representations. However, many existing contrastive-based methods show that traditional contrastive learning losses fail to consider the semantic information (e.g., class membership information). In addition, we theoretically show that clustering-based contrastive learning also easily leads to a sub-optimal solution. To address these issues, in this paper, we proposed an autoencoder-based clustering framework regularized by a similarity-guided contrastive loss to detect anomalous nodes. Specifically, we build a similarity map to help the model learn robust representations without imposing a hard margin constraint between the positive and negative pairs. Theoretically, we show that the proposed similarity-guided loss is a variant of contrastive learning loss, and how it alleviates the issue of unreliable pseudo-labels with the connection to graph spectral clustering. Experimental results on several datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed framework.


Understanding Simplicity Bias towards Compositional Mappings via Learning Dynamics

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Obtaining compositional mappings is important for the model to generalize well compositionally. To better understand when and how to encourage the model to learn such mappings, we study their uniqueness through different perspectives. Specifically, we first show that the compositional mappings are the simplest bijections through the lens of coding length (i.e., an upper bound of their Kolmogorov complexity). This property explains why models having such mappings can generalize well. We further show that the simplicity bias is usually an intrinsic property of neural network training via gradient descent. That partially explains why some models spontaneously generalize well when they are trained appropriately.


Exact Recovery Guarantees for Parameterized Non-linear System Identification Problem under Adversarial Attacks

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In this work, we study the system identification problem for parameterized non-linear systems using basis functions under adversarial attacks. Motivated by the LASSO-type estimators, we analyze the exact recovery property of a non-smooth estimator, which is generated by solving an embedded $\ell_1$-loss minimization problem. First, we derive necessary and sufficient conditions for the well-specifiedness of the estimator and the uniqueness of global solutions to the underlying optimization problem. Next, we provide exact recovery guarantees for the estimator under two different scenarios of boundedness and Lipschitz continuity of the basis functions. The non-asymptotic exact recovery is guaranteed with high probability, even when there are more severely corrupted data than clean data. Finally, we numerically illustrate the validity of our theory. This is the first study on the sample complexity analysis of a non-smooth estimator for the non-linear system identification problem.


Effectiveness of Pre-training for Few-shot Intent Classification

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This paper investigates the effectiveness of pre-training for few-shot intent classification. While existing paradigms commonly further pre-train language models such as BERT on a vast amount of unlabeled corpus, we find it highly effective and efficient to simply fine-tune BERT with a small set of labeled utterances from public datasets. Specifically, fine-tuning BERT with roughly 1,000 labeled data yields a pre-trained model -- IntentBERT, which can easily surpass the performance of existing pre-trained models for few-shot intent classification on novel domains with very different semantics. The high effectiveness of IntentBERT confirms the feasibility and practicality of few-shot intent detection, and its high generalization ability across different domains suggests that intent classification tasks may share a similar underlying structure, which can be efficiently learned from a small set of labeled data. The source code can be found at https://github.com/hdzhang-code/IntentBERT.


Learning large softmax mixtures with warm start EM

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Mixed multinomial logits are discrete mixtures introduced several decades ago to model the probability of choosing an attribute from $p$ possible candidates, in heterogeneous populations. The model has recently attracted attention in the AI literature, under the name softmax mixtures, where it is routinely used in the final layer of a neural network to map a large number $p$ of vectors in $\mathbb{R}^L$ to a probability vector. Despite its wide applicability and empirical success, statistically optimal estimators of the mixture parameters, obtained via algorithms whose running time scales polynomially in $L$, are not known. This paper provides a solution to this problem for contemporary applications, such as large language models, in which the mixture has a large number $p$ of support points, and the size $N$ of the sample observed from the mixture is also large. Our proposed estimator combines two classical estimators, obtained respectively via a method of moments (MoM) and the expectation-minimization (EM) algorithm. Although both estimator types have been studied, from a theoretical perspective, for Gaussian mixtures, no similar results exist for softmax mixtures for either procedure. We develop a new MoM parameter estimator based on latent moment estimation that is tailored to our model, and provide the first theoretical analysis for a MoM-based procedure in softmax mixtures. Although consistent, MoM for softmax mixtures can exhibit poor numerical performance, as observed other mixture models. Nevertheless, as MoM is provably in a neighborhood of the target, it can be used as warm start for any iterative algorithm. We study in detail the EM algorithm, and provide its first theoretical analysis for softmax mixtures. Our final proposal for parameter estimation is the EM algorithm with a MoM warm start.


A Novel Framework For Text Detection From Natural Scene Images With Complex Background

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Recognizing texts from camera images is a known hard problem because of the difficulties in text detection from the varied and complicated background. In this paper we propose a novel and efficient method to detect text region from images with complex background using Wavelet Transforms. The framework uses Wavelet Transformation of the original image in its grayscale form followed by Sub-band filtering. Then Region clustering technique is applied using centroids of the regions, further Bounding box is fitted to each region thus identifying the text regions. This method is much sophisticated and efficient than the previous methods as it doesn't stick to a particular font size of the text thus, making it generalized. The sample set used for experimental purpose consists of 50 images with varying backgrounds. Images with edge prominence are considered. Furthermore, our method can be easily customized for applications with different scopes.


WeatherReal: A Benchmark Based on In-Situ Observations for Evaluating Weather Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Accurate weather forecasting plays a vital role in saving lives, aiding emergency management, and reducing the economic impact of severe weather events [Bauer et al., 2015]. The traditional paradigm of weather forecasting is numerical weather prediction (NWP), which focuses on nonlinear partial differential equations to simulate atmospheric dynamics and physical processes [Benjamin et al., 2019]. In recent years, with the advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) technology and the continuous accumulation of massive weather data, data-driven methods have been increasingly incorporated into various stages and different scales of weather forecasting [Ravuri et al., 2021, Schultz et al., 2021, Weyn et al., 2021]. Particularly in the past two years, numerous data-driven models addressing the short to mediumrange (0-10 day) forecasting problem have emerged [Bi et al., 2023, Lam et al., 2023, Chen et al., 2023, Lang et al., 2024]. These models have surpassed the operational Integrated Forecast System (IFS) from European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) in metrics such as Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) and Anomaly Correlation Coefficient (ACC). These breakthroughs have instilled confidence that data-driven models can be significant tools for enhancing the accuracy and computational efficiency of weather forecasting.


Automatic Scene Generation: State-of-the-Art Techniques, Models, Datasets, Challenges, and Future Prospects

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Automatic scene generation is an essential area of research with applications in robotics, recreation, visual representation, training and simulation, education, and more. This survey provides a comprehensive review of the current state-of-the-arts in automatic scene generation, focusing on techniques that leverage machine learning, deep learning, embedded systems, and natural language processing (NLP). We categorize the models into four main types: Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), Transformers, and Diffusion Models. Each category is explored in detail, discussing various sub-models and their contributions to the field. We also review the most commonly used datasets, such as COCO-Stuff, Visual Genome, and MS-COCO, which are critical for training and evaluating these models. Methodologies for scene generation are examined, including image-to-3D conversion, text-to-3D generation, UI/layout design, graph-based methods, and interactive scene generation. Evaluation metrics such as Frechet Inception Distance (FID), Kullback-Leibler (KL) Divergence, Inception Score (IS), Intersection over Union (IoU), and Mean Average Precision (mAP) are discussed in the context of their use in assessing model performance. The survey identifies key challenges and limitations in the field, such as maintaining realism, handling complex scenes with multiple objects, and ensuring consistency in object relationships and spatial arrangements. By summarizing recent advances and pinpointing areas for improvement, this survey aims to provide a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners working on automatic scene generation.